Reviews
Matthew Wright
Fans of the Birkenhead post-punk humorists are a patient crowd. It’s been two years since the last album (they haven’t been more frequent since the 1990s) and now followers are rewarded not with new music, but, as the title allusively suggests, a collection of B-sides and EPs that are in some cases hard to find elsewhere. Stony ground indeed.There are some gems here. “Vatican Broadside” – all 30 seconds of it – is still genuinely funny, as is “Hair Like Brian May Blues”. Both songs combine verbal and musical humour in a way few musicians manage. The best of these pieces start with humour, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For decades Brian Wilson was depicted as the mad, lost genius of the Beach Boys, but these days, at 74, he's looking more like one of pop's great survivors. After all, he has comprehensively outlived his brothers Dennis and Carl, and has restored his reputation with deliriously acclaimed performances of Pet Sounds and the salvaged Sixties masterpiece SMiLE. He gets invited to all-star galas and awards ceremonies at the White House.Of course, a lot of care and attention (much of it medical and psychiatric) has gone into bringing Wilson back from the brink. In the opening chapter of this Read more ...
Peter Forbes
Scientists today tend to patronise the early Greek philosophers who, 2500 years ago, inaugurated enquiry into the nature of things. The Atomic Theory? A lucky guess, they allege. But Carlo Rovelli accords them, and especially Democritus, the key atomist, pride of place in his narrative: a see-saw battle between notions that the world consist of discrete units, beyond which we cannot go, and the idea of continuum without beginning or end.Rovelli gives these abstractions a local habitation and a name, using the insights of the Greek philosophers and the Latin poet Lucretius, who wove the atomic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The period between the October 1966 release of his eponymous debut album and its follow-up, August 1967’s baroque masterpiece Goodbye and Hello, saw Tim Buckley and his label Elektra reconsider how best to help him generate an impact. No matter how strong its songs and how unique his voice, the folk-rock styled Tim Buckley hadn’t been a big seller. Label boss Jac Holzman thought a non-album single would be good marketing tool, paving the way for a second album. One side of the shelved release surfaced in 2009 on the Where The Action Is! – Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968 box set. Otherwise, no Read more ...
David Nice
What would Glyndebourne, staging Madama Butterfly for the first time, bring to Puccini's most heartbreaking tragedy? Subtle realism, perhaps? Certainly the composer, along with his superb librettists Giacosa and Illica, offers plenty of opportunities. Yet director Annilese Miskimmon botches nearly every significant moment, and it's surely her fault if her three principals are as wooden as the suggestion of lacquered trees dominating the sets.Vocally, at least, this was a respectable evening, occasionally a little more than that. Korean soprano Karah Son can fill high-lying phrases with Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jay C. Batzner: as if to each other… R. Andrew Lee (piano) (Irritable Hedgehog)Like the Charlemagne Palestine disc reviewed a few weeks ago, this release won’t be to all tastes. But give as if to each other… sufficient time and it will get under your skin. Jay C. Batzner’s 24 minute work for solo and piano and electronics was prompted by the RPM Challenge, a yearly ‘creative challenge’ originally sponsored by the magazine The Wire, where musicians are invited to create an album (“10 songs or 35 minutes”) in the shortest month of the year – recordings to be submitted by noon on March 1st. The Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The first thing you hear are the marimbas – music that’s pounded, punched out of the air by hundreds of fists. Later the instruments give us dances and songs, but this musical violence is never truly absent from an orchestra made up entirely of percussion. It’s the heartbeat of A Man of Good Hope, a tale whose chapters are measured out in blows, beatings, rapes and murders, whose very horizon is barred with corrugated iron.Jonny Steinberg’s 2015 book tells the story of the author’s encounter with Assad Abdulahi, a Somalian refugee he met in South Africa. Fleeing Mogadishu after the murder of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Among the myriad global offerings at the LFF, the resoundingly British Their Finest ★★★★★ , about a group of film-makers working for the Ministry of Information in London in 1940, is surely among the most sheerly enjoyable. Okay, it was directed by Denmark's Lone Scherfig (of The Riot Club and An Education), but the way it catches the Blitz-era mood of terror and uncertainty mixed with a determination to band together and carry on feels almost miraculous.Adapting Lissa Evans's novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, Scherfig and screenwriter Gaby Chiappe have created a hilarious but beadily Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Dan Brown is famed for calamitous language massacres that sell by the kerchillion to tone-deaf Renaissance cryptogram junkies. His sentences hurt eyes and his plots numb skulls. But one thing you can say for Brown is he checks facts like an obsessive-compulsive über-nerd. When the books are transplanted to the big screen, he gets less control over this stuff. The result, in Inferno, is unintentionally comical to anyone (which means pretty much everyone) who knows Florence.The film opens with a bearded redhead being chased by hunks in suits to the top of the campanile of the Badia Fiorentina Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In this autumn’s Vagabonds Collection, Viktor and Rolf showed a pink top covered in hundreds of buttons and framed with elaborate furls of pale pink and blue tulle; did they intend the model to look as if she was wearing a giant vulva across her chest? For me, this is the most vulgar garment (pictured below right) in an exhibition that supposedly explores the concept of vulgarity, yet is full of extremely tasteful designs.On video, fashion designers like Manolo Blahnik, Zandra Rhodes and Christian Lacroix discuss what vulgarity means in terms of their work. Most interesting is milliner Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may have thought that the Brexit vote in June would have been manna from heaven for Al Murray as the Pub Landlord, his knucklehead xenophobe creation. But in this uneven and – at two-and-a-half hours – overlong show, the referendum result and what it means for this country is mentioned early on but is hardly the focus of the show.And that's an enormous shame, as Murray's recent shows have put politics front and centre of his act to great and rejuvenating effect for a character that had, for me at least, long become stale and predictable.Let's Go Backwards Together augurs well in this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems morbid, and perhaps even in dubious taste, to create a TV drama franchise focusing on the hideous fate of abducted children and the repercussions this has on their family and friends. Still, ratings are their own reward, and the first series of The Missing (a collaboration between the BBC and the US network Starz) was a critical and commercial success.So welcome to series two, now starring Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey in place of series one's James Nesbitt and Frances O'Connor (they call this an "anthology series"). Our new protagonists are Gemma and Sam Webster. Thanks to Sam's Read more ...